My second and last daughter recently graduated from college, which finishes 8 years of college related air-travel (from the Midwest to the east and west coasts.) I’ve collected here some thoughts (some of which are probably pretty obvious) that might be useful for parents sending their kids off to college in the fall:

1. Use FF tickets for the students - The college students are unlikely to fly enough miles to obtain elite status. On both college trips and family vacations, use the frequent flyer tickets for them, and pay for your own ticket if you are elite, so you get elite benefits and credit towards new elite status.
2. College Plus – This one is unique to United, but there is a program they should sign up for called College Plus. http://www.united.com/page/middlepag...3,1271,00.html The most important feature is that they get 10,000 miles when they graduate, assuming they signed up before graduation. You just have to send in a final transcript after graduation. If they go to graduate school they can sign up again and get another 10,000. Another feature of college plus is the credit card, which has no annual fee and gives 1 mile for every two dollars charged. Our experience is that each daughter applied for the card; was rejected for a reason which didn’t seem to make sense, applied again, got a second rejection letter, but also got the card the second time.
3. Stopovers –. A domestic ticket on most airlines is 25,000, while a trip overseas is 50,000. But a trip overseas with a domestic stopover is also 50,000. During the longer breaks, such as spring break, we combined a trip home with a trip overseas for 50,000 three times. This worked well for us because Chicago is an overseas hub for International flights both east and west, but it might work just as well for many others.
4. How many accounts? – There is plenty of advice on flyertalk about whether to concentrate on one airline or get accounts on many airlines. We have done the latter, with accounts on each of the big 6. If you do, there are often promotions involved with signing up, so don’t open an account until either the student is flying on that airline or there is SPAM-like promotion for free miles.
5. FF 101 -- If you are a mileage junkie, like many of us on Flyertalk, do not expect your college student to also be one. They like the free miles, of course, but college students will definitely set their own time priorities. I found it easier to manage my family’s frequent flyer accounts, than to nag them to do so. You do have to politely remind them (repeatedly) to be sure to include the number for every flight, and to save boarding passes.
6. Promotions and Expiration issues – There are occasionally lucrative ff offers based on non-flight activities. I found that we could put a child’s name on our home telephone account, but leave the listing in our name, and make them eligible for miles in a long-distance phone program. You can also register credit cards that are in the adults name with IDINE in the name of the student. (In other words, you go out to eat with your own cc and they get the miles.) And be sure to keep you eyes on the SPAM forum for surveys, email signups, etc. This is also a useful way to generate occasional activity in a program that has some miles, but is getting close to 3 years of inactivity.
7. Visiting -- Another thing you can do to generate occasional activity is when you visit the student at college, if you have to make a hotel or motel reservation anyway. You can put the reservation in their name so they can get the miles/points. Elite hotel benefits don’t happen to be an issue for us.
8. Gateway city – This isn’t really miles related, except that it is needed for point 3. We found it advantageous to do at least one trip that was one-way (possibly with a throwaway ticket), so the college city is their “gateway” for trips home. Some good fares seem to have a maximum stay of about a month.

Please feel free to add other suggestions, point out weaknesses in our ideas, questions, etc.